By Craig Morgan, Special to TheSunDevils.com
TEMPE, Ariz. -- When Scottie Graham ponders the future of the fledgling Arizona State women's lacrosse team he sees vast opportunity. There are 106 women's Division I lacrosse programs in the United States. Even with the addition of ASU and Colorado State, only 12 of them are in the Mountain or Pacific Time zones.
"It's a natural fit because there is this hotbed of lacrosse players in the San Diego area and a lot of those ladies are flying right over us to go to the Dukes, Syracuses and Harvards of the world," said Graham, a Senior Associate Athletics Director for Sun Devil Athletics. "There are lots of players in Colorado and California and even here who want to play college lacrosse. Now there's an opportunity."
ASU Vice President for Athletics Ray Anderson formally announced the addition of women's lacrosse and women's triathlon as varsity sports at a press conference in October. On Tuesday, Anderson named Courtney Martinez Connor as the lacrosse program's first coach after a national search.
Martinez Connor spent the last several years as a lacrosse analyst for ESPN and Big Ten Network, after successful coaching stints at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (2005-09) and Mt. St. Mary's (2001-05), where she became the all-time winningest coach in Mountaineer women’s lacrosse history with 43 victories. After taking the head job right out of college, Martinez Connor led Mount St. Mary’s to the Northeast Conference (NEC) Tournament title game in her final three seasons and back-to-back NEC Championships and NCAA tournament bids in 2004 and 2005.
In her first year at UMBC, Martinez Connor led the Retrievers to the program’s first America East regular-season title with a 5-1 conference record in 2006. The team also recorded its first-ever victory against defending conference champion and then seventh-ranked Boston University, also the first victory over a ranked team for the program. Martinez Connor was named the America East Coach of the Year in 2006.
"I am passionate about the sport and can't wait to start building the lacrosse tradition that will make the Sun Devil community proud," Martinez Connor said in a statement. "More importantly, I am excited to share my vision with recruits as Arizona State has committed to providing the resources to ignite a Championship program,” Martinez Connor said.
The women's lacrosse team will begin competition in the spring of 2018 and will play its games at Sun Devil Soccer Stadium, home of ASU women's soccer. Initial funding for both lacrosse and triathlon came from a Sun Devil Athletics-record $32-million donation from Don Mullett and another booster last year to elevate the men's hockey team from a club program to NCAA Division I status.
Title IX compliance requires Sun Devil athletics to add a proportional amount of women’s scholarships to men’s scholarships, but the idea of expansion is one Anderson has enthusiastically embraced as he seeks to provide as many athletic opportunities for student-athletes as such schools as Stanford and Ohio State.
"If rock-paper-scissors were a varsity sport, Ray would want to play it and Ray would want to win it," Graham said, laughing.
ASU will become the sixth Pac-12 school with varsity women's lacrosse, joining California, Colorado, Stanford, Oregon and USC. Those schools currently compete with five others (Denver, Fresno State, San Diego State, St. Mary's and UC Davis) in the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation (MPSF), but, with the addition of Arizona State, the Pac-12 announced last week its plans to incorporate the sport into the conference and sponsor a championship now that it has reached the minimum threshold of six teams. The five remaining MPSF schools could absorb Colorado State to return to a six-team conference. Colorado State announced in April that it would also add women's lacrosse.
"Lacrosse will afford us another way of promoting gender equity but when you look at GSR (graduation success rates) for Division I lacrosse, they're at 95 percent, so that's a reflection of the type of student-athletes driven to play the sport," said ASU senior associate athletic director and senior women's administrator, Deana Garner Smith. "Lacrosse is one of fastest growing sports in the nation. NCAA sponsorship has almost doubled over the past decade so this move makes sense."
Local officials hope the move spurs further expansion of the sport within Arizona's borders.
"It's one of the biggest things that could have happened to the Arizona lacrosse scene," said Tyna Murphy, the high school director and a coach for the Desert Heat lacrosse club, who is also a nationally rated official by U.S. Lacrosse, the sport's national governing body. "Not only will this have a ripple effect on the collegiate level out west, but we're hoping it will have an effect on the high school level."
Lacrosse is currently a club sport in Arizona. There have been discussions with the Arizona Interscholastic Association (AIA) about adding it as a varsity sport, but costs and field availability are two concerns that have thus far prevented its addition.
"The big thing for the AIA is they have told us they want to bring boys and girls on at the same time," Murphy said. "In order to do that, you need a lot more fields than we have."
Jared Black, the president of the executive committee for the Arizona Girls Lacrosse Association, said there are more than a dozen schools with club teams in the Valley and Tucson at the varsity and JV levels, with about 400 players competing.
"I don't think we're at the point where we can offer a lot of recruits at that level but we had a couple girls recruited last year to play Division I and a few more are playing Division I or Division III," said Black of a recruiting class that included Stanford's Areta Buness, a Phoenix Xavier graduate. "Now that ASU has a varsity program, these girls will have role models to emulate and they'll be able to go watch games. That didn't exist before."
Graham believes the creation of the program will be a watershed moment for the sport in Arizona.
"This is right in keeping with Ray's vision for the athletics department and Dr. (Michael) Crow's vision for the university," said Graham, who played the sport in high school and has two children who play. "There's a lot of excitement from the people we've spoken to here in Arizona. We're opening up even more opportunities for young women, locally. That's what we're supposed to do."
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